Health, social functioning, and marital status: Stability and change among elderly recently widowed women
✍ Scribed by Kate Mary Bennett; Kevin Morgan
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1992
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 422 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0885-6230
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Four-year changes in mental and physical health, morale and social functioning were assessed in a random sample of elderly women widowed during the course of a longitudinal study, together with never-married and still-married controls. All groups showed an age-related decline in mental and physical health, with the widows, the never-married, and the still-married displaying differing patterns of psychological change over time. However, while widows showed significantly greater changes in morale and personal disturbance, their levels of social functioning remained stable over the four-year period. The results confirm earlier findings of lifestyle stability after the loss of a spouse and indicate that, in addition to bereavement per se, single status and ageing itself may contribute substantially to the measured longitudinal effects of widowhood.
KEY woms-Longitudinal, widowhood, elderly women, mental health, physical health, social functioning.
For many elderly people widowhood is a highprobability life event. In Britain, for example, over 36% of all people aged 65 years or over are widowed (OPCS, 1990a). Further, the prospect of widowhood is greater for women than for men. In 1988, 50% of elderly British women were widowed, while 39% were married and the remainder were either never-married or divorced. With increasing age the number of widows rises steadily, such that, at age 75 or over, 65% of women are widowed (OPCS, 1990a). These findings reflect both women's greater life expectancy (in 1985 at age 70 women had a life expectancy of 13.6 years and men 10.4 years; OPCS, 1990b) and women's tendency to marry men older than themselves.
Widowhood can affect both mental and physical health. For example, Jacobs et ai. (1989) found that